To End All Wars: The Graphic Anthology of The First World War, John Stuart Clark and Jonathan Clode, editors, Turnaround Publisher Services

To End All Wars: The Graphic Anthology of The First World War is a striking and welcome work in the current climate, as it makes a sincere effort to bring a critical view of World War I to a wide audience. It is a graphic anthology, presenting 26 separate stories (by 53 artists), with an eye towards the popularity of comics among young people who are otherwise taught little about the reality of war.

Each comic is factually based and deals with a specific element or episode of the 1914-1918 conflict; each is creatively developed to bring the subject matter to life. The stories reveal the experiences of soldiers, sailors, victims of colonialism, nurses, civilians, journalists, propagandists and others. Stories involving military personnel bring out not only the cruelty of the conflict, but also the absurdity, dark humor and human drama that took place.

Many of the artists and writers who contributed works come from Britain, but there is work as well from artists in Ireland, Indonesia, Spain, Greece, Argentina, the US and elsewhere—13 countries in all. This results in a wide variety of styles and approaches. Certain artists chose very light and cartoon-like visuals, while others used highly detailed and representational images. Many drawings were done with pen and ink (hand drawn or digital), but a few artists adopted a more painterly approach.

Editor John Stuart Clark wrote and drew the first comic in the anthology, “The Iron Dice.” It is crucial to the work, as it addresses the issue of overall responsibility for the criminal war. Concretely, it presents a scenario in which the leaders of the various war powers appear before the International Criminal Court, while a global audience of injured and ghastly World War I veterans demands the defendants explain to the world how such a calamity came about.

As the proceedings begin, a victim states, “But we were told war was inevitable,” to which another responds: “Then history needs re-examining.” From there, a peg-legged war veteran prosecutor listens to the stammering, arrogant explanations of British, French, German and Austrian royalty and military brass. As they try to explain their provocative actions in the Balkans, the prosecutor asks for clarification: “We are talking 1914, not 2014? It sounds familiar.”

The drama of the prosecution is heightened by the page layout, which gives an energetic arrangement to the text, with inclusion of selected historical material. The comic ends with a couple sitting at home, watching television, which has just cut away from the proceedings at the court to get “the latest on the eurozone crisis.”

The Coward’s War

Several of the comics offer exceptional combinations of artwork and narrative. “The Coward’s War,” with art by Matt Soffe, is so strikingly illustrated that each panel demands to be viewed on a much larger scale. The medium is hard to pinpoint; it has characteristics of pastel, watercolor and digital illustration, which blend beautifully together.

It tells the story of a teenage boy, Thomas Highgate, who joins the British Army at the beginning of the war, and contrasts his naïveté and youth to the savagery to come. Dramatic images show “machines … chemicals … high explosives,” and then, his boyish face: “A simple soldier with a pocketful of national pride had no chance.”

The story follows his tragic fate: he would fall not on the front lines, but at the hands of a firing squad for desertion, thanks to the vicious, contemptuous attitude of the British high command. As one soldier says at the end: “As if there weren’t enough bloomin’ ways to die already.”

“Dead in the Water” is perhaps the most striking and dramatic comic in the anthology; its story and visuals combine harmoniously. The comic begins with the British high command sneeringly dismissing the threat that the new German U-boats present to the “mighty British Navy.” Meanwhile, three British ships are cruising the North Sea when spotted by U9, a German U-boat, which quickly sinks all three ships without suffering any damage itself.

Dead in the Water

The torpedo strikes kill 1,459 British sailors, who are shown fighting to stay above water amid wreckage through frenetic line work and the haunting representation of the faces.

Other comics in the anthology might have ended here, but a turn of the pages reveals one of the more memorable images in the book—a large image of the U-boat captain that breaks the bounds of panels to show both the official German celebration of the slaughter and the captain’s own distress over witnessing the drowning sailors. Juxtaposition and contrast are used to excellent effect in the two-page spread, while later pages show the tragic climax of his dilemma as a participant in the violence.

No More than Cattle

A significant inclusion in the anthology is Colm Regan’s “No More Than Cattle” set in Nyasaland, a British colonial protectorate in southern Africa, now Malawi. In its short format, the comic provides historical background about colonial oppression in the region and then briefly explains the social structure existing during the war. Africans already facing daily oppression on agricultural estates were forced to become the labor force of European armies on the continent under predictably brutal conditions.

The story follows one example, on the massive A.L. Bruce estate in Magomero district, where the absurdity of dying for the colonial empires pushes social antagonisms to the breaking point. A letter from a local Christian pastor, John Chilembwe, opposing African involvement in the war, is censored by a British-run newspaper.

Meanwhile, workers on the estate rebel and kill an estate manager and a storeowner. Chilembwe and others flee to Mozambique as the British respond with mass killings, 36 executions and lengthy prison sentences. Colonial rule persists, but opposition to British rule is clearly established. The story brings valuable history to light.

More could be said about other works, which offer varying degrees of intriguing subject matter and imagery, but space is limited. One general element missing in the work, however, with a few exceptions, is any effort to provide a broader, socio-historical explanation of how the war began and how it ended.

For example, “The Iron Dice” puts the rulers of Europe on trial, but a significant reality making the launching of war possible was the collapse of Social Democracy, the official mass leadership of the working class, which had sworn to oppose such an eventuality. The parties of the Second International in Germany, France and elsewhere voted for war credits and lined up with their own ruling elite and military against the populations of other countries, enabling the bloodbath to take place. None of the comics explores this complex but critical factor.

Also absent is the Russian Revolution of 1917, the response of the working class to the crisis of the capitalist system that had produced the war. Various stories show opposition to war within the ranks of the British, French, and German armies, as well as among civilians, but Russia was the country where that opposition found its highest expression, in the overthrow of one of the regimes responsible for the mass slaughter. (“Go Home And Sit Still,” about Scottish nurses, provides a hint of this, but no story treats the subject head-on.)

Overall, in any event, To End All Wars is a powerful reply to those who now seek to rewrite the history of the First World War to hide its reactionary and imperialist character. Over the course of its 326 pages, readers will find a number of moving stories and images—and plenty of parallels to the sinister lies and machinations of the great powers today.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government is conducting a four-year official extravaganza to “celebrate” WWI, which includes the April 25, 2015 “Anzac Day” centenary of the British-led military invasion of Gallipoli, on Turkey’s Dardanelle Peninsula, which involved 11,000 Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) troops.

The following is an edited version of the discussion with Stephens, whose remarks were made in a personal capacity.

David Stephens: If you start with the assumption that all history is open to interpretation—and that’s what E. H. Carr says in What is History?—then everyone writes the history that reflects their own interests. The same thing, of course, applies to governments.

Governments want a history that reflects their own interests and current agenda. They look back at history and make the war commemoration activities and speeches, school curriculum and so on, into a version they want.

It’s the same in every country. The British are doing it in their commemorations for World War I. The Russians, the Turks are doing the same. The Americans have done it for centuries.

DS: Labor and Liberal have basically been bipartisan about Gallipoli and Anzac for the past 25 years. People blamed previous Liberal Prime Minister Howard for starting the promotion of Anzac but it was really [Labor Prime Minister] Hawke much more than Howard. Both sides of politics think they gain an advantage by being seen to praise soldiers and construct and dedicate memorials to war.

Abbott and [former Labor Prime Minister] Julia Gillard both talk about an Anzac “tradition of arms” going from Gallipoli to Afghanistan. They all use our history of going to war to whip up enthusiasm for the current war, wherever that happens to be. Howard was probably the most blatant with the Iraq War but others have done similar things.

The World War I centenary committee was established under the Rudd Labor government. In 2010, [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd gave one of the most over-the-top examples of what we call “Anzackery”—the overblown, sentimental, tear-jerking, jingoistic treatment of it.

The WWI centenary committee made various recommendations about how to commemorate Anzac Day and the centenary. If you look at the list of potential commemorative things, about 250 separate occasions could be commemorated between 2014 and 2018.

The list goes from when the first Australian won a Victoria Cross in 1898, through to the most recent event in 2008. The committee is essentially saying that this is not only an opportunity to commemorate things that happened a century ago in Turkey or the Somme but to commemorate every other military-type event in the past 100 years. Theoretically, they could be commemorating something virtually every day for the next four years. That’s where politics takes over.

When politicians talk about the freedom and honour inscribed on the King’s Penny, which was handed out to the relatives of soldiers who died in WWI, they’re justifying something to the families after the fact.

DS: The commemorations get children into a particular frame of mind about war. Children are told that Australian soldiers went off on an adventure, that they thought they were going to Europe for a bit of fun and then they “fell”—the word “fallen” is always used—and made the supreme sacrifice.

Some kids grasp a bit more about what that means but they certainly don’t get the full story. They’re not told that “falling” often meant getting your head blown off, or your innards ripped out and being picked up in a bucket by your friends. That kind of reality is suppressed. So they’re presented with a rose-coloured view of what war is about.

I recently listened to the roll of honour soundscape as part of the WWI commemorations at the War Memorial [in Canberra] and which involves Year 6 school kids reciting the names of fallen soldiers. The kids don’t really know what they’re doing. Twelve-year-olds don’t understand what’s been presented to them and I don’t believe they should be involved.

David Turnoy, an American elementary teacher and author of history textbooks, has said that the first information presented to children about a particular subject becomes the children’s baseline. All subsequent information is taken in by making connections to this original information and judged in the light of it. In other words, what is presented to children first is how they understand it later on.

We asked the Australian Minister for Veteran Affairs Michael Ronaldson what he meant by younger generation having “obligations.” Did he mean moral obligations or physical ones? He replied: “Young people should realise that their freedom was bought in blood.”

The only point in saying that is to ensure that children are in a frame of mind that they recognise they may have to pay the same price as their ancestors did. All this talk about “carrying forward the torch of remembrance,” sounds a bit banal but when government ministers say you have to pay for it in blood, this implication is obvious.

Ronaldson would say: “We’re not glorifying war.” While the government may not be explicitly glorifying it, it is sentimentalising war. They’re doing it in such a way that little kids are given a particular attitude to war that will translate later into: “This must be what we’re expected to do as Australians … We have to carry this torch.”

There’s a poem by Osbert Sitwell, “The Next War,” written in 1918. It’s a great poem because it talks about plutocrats discussing a memorial for the fallen. They end up saying that the best memorial would be that our children should fall for the same cause. This poem resonates today because children are again being told to fall for that same cause.

SA: You recently commented on the education programs offered at the national war memorial in Canberra. Could you explain?

DS: The war memorial’s program for primary school children has many parts. Children can attend the Discovery Zone, where you can pretend to be in a trench on the Western Front, or get down low fighting the enemy in Vietnam. You may choose to try on the nurses’ uniforms. So, if you’re not grabbed by something, you’re grabbed by something else.

[Australian Victoria Cross winner] Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith writes in the foreword to his recent book that he was inspired to become a soldier after attending war memorials and seeing all the poppies as a child. I feel like saying to him, the war memorial is 100,000 names of people who were killed and often in terrible circumstances. Very little is told about the post-traumatic stress disorders suffered, the terrible facial injuries or the amputated limbs.

The war memorial has locked cabinets of photographs of facial injuries from those in WWI. We’ve recommended they do an exhibition with these photographs to show the other side of war. These were people who didn’t die gloriously, but came back to live the rest of their lives looking like that.

There’s a real issue of when you can teach children the full spread and reality about war. Maybe it shouldn’t be looked at until Year 9 and until you can do it in an honest way.

Teachers don’t have to be patriotic when presenting the curriculum on this. They have to try to present both sides of the story. We get reports from teachers who say they receive the curriculum material from Veterans Affairs and throw it out but I imagine teachers are under a lot of pressure not to resist the visits by Returned Soldiers Leagues [RSL] people or from Vietnam veterans.

There are alternative curriculums that can be taught, such as the medical effects of war, put together by the History Teachers Association of Victoria with the Medical Association for the Prevention of War. Teachers say to us, that they have an obligation not to take sides, but I say to them, it’s not taking sides, it’s just ensuring that students have a broader range to consider.

The federal department of education also has the PACER [Parliament and Civics Education Rebate] scheme. Schools and students are subsidised for organising a trip to Canberra, provided they go to the war memorial, parliament house and the electoral education centre. The inevitable logic of all of this is that they’re preparing the younger generation to be recruited for war.

This is the trailer for the inspiring new feature length documentary Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is possible now available on DVD from the charity WORLDwrite. The full film is packed with little-known facts, rare archive imagery, expert interviews and exclusive testimony from Sylvia’s son, Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita. The campaigns Sylvia led embraced far more than ‘votes for women‘ as she uniquely understood the fight for democratic rights required a challenge to the system. For full details visit here.

Katherine Connelly tells of how the radical Suffragette gave East End kids a glimmer of hope in the depths of World War I

There was little to celebrate at Christmas in 1915. The war that was supposed to have ended the Christmas before had turned into mass slaughter in the trenches which seemed destined to go on for many years more.

Sylvia Pankhurst, the socialist militant Suffragette and leader of the working-class East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS), witnessed the devastation that this second year of war inflicted on the East End.

After German U-boats sank the US passenger ship Lusitania in early May 1915, newspaper front pages shrieked for revenge.

There were anti-German riots in the East End, two ELFS members who had married German men found their homes under attack, while another member was hurt in her efforts to stop the rioting.

The first bombing raid on the overcrowded East End came in the night at the end of May. The next morning Sylvia Pankhurst found her roof covered in shrapnel.

And yet when this dark year had drawn to a close, Sylvia Pankhurst organised huge children’s parties in the East End of London.

Over 900 children came to the party in Bow Baths. Two days later a party was held for their parents and there were more parties held close by in Poplar and Canning Town.

Support for the parties poured in from anti-war socialists, Suffragettes and pacifists.

George Lansbury, editor of the socialist newspaper the Daily Herald and formerly an east London Labour MP, performed a puppet show for the children.

The radical playwright George Bernard Shaw judged the essays the children wrote about the party, sending each one a witty appraisal of their work in which he pretended to fine them for making him undertake such work as “counting 22 kisses for Miss Pankhurst” — in fact every child who entered won a shilling and sixpence.

Norah Smyth, who had once drilled the “People’s Army,” a band of east London men and women who armed themselves to defend Suffragettes from the police, dressed up as Father Christmas and delivered the presents.

The scale and success of the parties were testament to years of radical campaigning in east London.

They reflected the local community’s mounting anger at the war and its determination to build a fundamentally different society for their children.

In 1912 Sylvia Pankhurst decided to organise a Suffragette campaign in impoverished east London.

In contrast with her mother and elder sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Sylvia believed that if the Suffragette campaign was to be successful it had to involve the vast majority of women, not just a small elite.

From the birth of New Unionism with the matchwomen’s strike of 1888 to the dock strike of 1912, the East End had proved the immense power that organised workers could have.

The new ELFS drew great strength from uniting their demands for political representation with the social and economic struggles of workers.

Soon striking women workers were joining the east London Suffragettes, while local trade union branches and large sections of the community were defending the Suffragettes from police attacks and joining their demonstrations.

With the outbreak of the first world war, the British government demanded that everyone make sacrifices for the sake of national unity. But it was the poorest in society who were forced to sacrifice the most.

The ELFS campaigned against the way in which the prosecution of the war was particularly devastating the lives of working-class women.

In response to the poverty caused by wartime unemployment, the rocketing cost of food and rent, and the unequal pay and dangerous conditions for women workers in the new munitions industry, the ELFS organised demonstrations, deputations and a range of schemes including affordable restaurants, clinics, nurseries, legal advice and even their own toy-making factory.

In part, the children’s parties that Sylvia Pankhurst organised at the beginning of 1916 were an extension of these acts of community solidarity which particularly focused on alleviating the suffering that war was inflicting on working women and their children.

This suffering was soon cruelly brought home in the midst of the celebrations.

A highlight of the children’s party at Bow had been a pageant in which the free-spirited role of “the Spirit of the Woods” had been given to 16-year-old Rose Pengelly who entertained the children by dancing and playing the panpipes.

Rose had met Sylvia two years before when she joined the Junior Suffragettes Club and led her workmates out on strike.

Back at work after the pageant, and looking forward to dancing at the upcoming party, her hand was crushed under the machine she worked at.

Her boss would not pay for a taxi and so she had to walk to the station and take a train to the hospital where, after waiting for hours to be seen, her thumb and two fingers were amputated.

If the parties were a short-lived moment of joy amidst these bitter experiences, they also expressed the east London Suffragettes’ hopes for the new year. In doing so they captured a significant changing attitude to the war.

In August 1914 not all the ELFS members had opposed the war. Some supported the war aims, believing the government’s claims that the war was just and would soon be over. Now, after 16 months of war, the pageant at the ELFS party called for an end to the war.

At the front of the pageant two toddlers held banners calling for “Peace” and “Plenty.”

The pageant included a “Spirit of Peace” who was played by Joan Beauchamp, soon to become the editor of the conscientious objectors’ journal Tribunal and who was to suffer imprisonment for her anti-war activities.

The new year saw the ELFS turn to explicit anti-war campaigning which increasingly reflected a growing popular mood. By December 1916 they were holding peace demonstrations at the gates of the east London docks and Victoria Park.

At this time of year, thoughts stray to Christmas a century ago, precisely because of the horror and madness of the world war which by then had been widely predicted to be over, and which in fact had just begun.

Yet in Glasgow the voice of socialist thinker-activist John Maclean, imprisoned for an anti-war speech made at this time, was not silenced. (Answering the rhetorical question “Why don’t you enlist?” he replied simply: “I have been enlisted for 15 years in the socialist army, and God damn all other armies.”)

He wrote: “Even supposing Germany to blame, the motive force is not the ambitions of the Kaiser …but the profit of the plundering class of Germany. Colonial expansion was denied the Germans because the British, the Russians and the French had picked up most of the available ports of the world.

“What could the Germans do but build up an army and a navy that would hold its own against all comers? … Plunderers against plunderers, with the workers as pawns taking the murdering with right good will.”

The brutality of the bare casualty facts in those early months of the war numbs the mind and assaults the senses.

By the end of 1914, the Expeditionary Force ferried over to France in August had sustained 90,000 casualties, of which around a third were fatalities.

The people of colonial India, who had not been consulted about taking part in the war, had lost more than 2,000 soldiers by that date too.

Many thousands of wounded men were taken back across the Channel to hospitals. Most of Britain’s professional army in France was wiped out.

The British force had aided the much larger French army in denying the German forces a successful advance on Paris and in creating the long ragged line of the Western Front.

French losses — half a million. German losses — half a million.

Truth about the reality of the fighting was denied to the British people. Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty tells us that French losses of 300,000 men over 11 days in August were not reported in Britain until after the war’s end.

Unpublicised too were the comparable losses of ally Tsarist Russia — over 300,000 Russian troops were killed, wounded or taken prisoner during one month.

Gung-ho First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill wrote to his wife in November a letter she could have virtuously turned over to the police as unpatriotic. The letter included the observation: “What would happen … if the armies suddenly and simultaneously went on strike and said some other method must be found of settling the dispute!”

In August this was 5’8, by October it was 5’5, and soon after that it was down to 5’3.

Inevitably a major recruiting weapon was the shaming of those who shirked patriotism. It was not always effective.

The miners’ leader Robert Smillie, faced with one notorious recruiting poster which featured children asking their guilt-ridden civilian father what he had done in the “Great War” said his answer would be: “I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.”

But even the anti-war Herald, edited by George Lansbury and reduced from a daily to a weekly paper, became quiet about the war until December, while Labour MP and future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, treated by the mainstream press as arrogantly anti-war, was actually both for and against it: a difficult position to defend without resorting to evasion and deception. So he resorted to evasion and deception.

Yet almost all of the Independent Labour Party’s national council, including Fenner Brockway, youthful editor of the Labour Leader, were anti-war. In October he wrote and dispatched letters to the German socialist leaders via neutral countries determined that positive contact should be established.

In Glasgow anti-war sentiments were strong among a local socialist leadership in which John Maclean was outstanding. In Bath Street, standing on a table on a Sunday evening towards the end of 1914, he spoke to a large and attentive gathering.

A witness later reported the power of the occasion to Maclean’s biographer. I quote: “The war, he told them, was not an accident. It was the continuation of the peaceful competition for trade and for markets already carried on between the powers before hostilities broke out … the main thing for them to know was that the real enemy was the employers, and that so long as … all the tools of wealth production were possessed by a small class of privileged people, then so long they would be slaves.”

Meanwhile, the radical liberal and mainly middle class Union of Democratic Control was set up in London to agitate against secret diplomacy and for the war’s early end.

In east London hundreds of women rallied around Sylvia Pankhurst’s Suffragette Federation and her anti-war paper The Woman’s Dreadnought – and around her Cost Price Restaurant, whose very title confronted profiteering at a time of rapidly rising prices.

Towards the end of December, Fenner Brockway’s October letter to German socialist leaders bore fruit. He received encouraging replies from Karl Liebknecht (who, to his eternal honour, had that month as a parliamentary deputy voted alone against war credits), Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin. These confirmed — British socialists needed to hear it — the German socialist leaders’ antipathy to the war and their continued commitment to international socialism.

A century ago, Germany was the underdog capitalist European country, pressing for parity with the British and French empires.

Today, with the United States as the world’s top dog country, and with Britain left with subservient ally status, the scramble for markets and to control resources, rulers and regions — with war as enforcer — goes on. The inseparability of capitalism and war is day by day murderously demonstrated.

The brave activism of Maclean, Brockway, Pankhurst and many others in Britain, and of their counterparts in Germany and elsewhere, reminds us of the other truth — that as long as capitalism and war continue, there can be no let-up in the struggle against both.

These three monarchs would spend the next dozen or so years holidaying in each other’s palaces while they quarrelled and played out a series of political intrigues that would end in war in Europe and in Soviet power in St Petersburg.

But in those last dozen or so years of peace the British countryside enjoyed a kind of rural idyll — a brief lull before the cataclysmic storm.

Each year would bring its cycle of seasonal celebrations. Ploughing, May Day maypole dancing, Musical Harvest Homes and at the year’s end the mystery and mumming plays of antiquity.

There were thousands of local customs stretching back into the mists of time.

Mostly of course there was poverty and hard times for the ordinary country folk. Often the quaint customs, the mumming plays or the morris dancing was just another chance to collect a few pence to eke out the meagre wages paid by rich but mean and greedy farmers.

In 1872 2,000 agricultural workers had flocked to join one of Britain’s first trades unions. Joseph Arch had formed his Agricultural Workers Union under a chestnut tree in Wellsbourne, Warwickshire.

The fight for higher wages had begun but it was to be a very long fight indeed.

A number of people realised that it was important to record some of the old customs, the old folk plays, the songs, the dances. Collectors would venture out into the villages and hamlets to record all kinds of folk traditions.

Perhaps none of the collectors realised just how many of these seemingly timeless and everlasting traditional pieces would be swept away by the horror and slaughter starting on the fields of Flanders.

Take just one example. George Butterworth was a keen folk song collector and also danced in Cecil Sharpe’s demonstration Morris Side.

For me Butterworth’s compositions such as Banks of Green Willow, Two English Idylls and his settings of AE Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad are among the finest examples of English pastoral music. They all use folk melodies that the composer collected himself.

Butterworth marched off to war but before he left for France he destroyed much of his work. He didn’t think it good enough and anyway he knew he would have much more time after the war to write much better works.

George Butterworth died in 1916 in the mud of the Somme. He was just 31.

Reginald John Elliott Tiddy was another leading light of the folk dance movement and a close associate of Cecil Sharp. Tiddy’s particular fascination were the folk plays performed in many English villages around Christmas time.

Tiddy taught English literature at Trinity College, Oxford, and each mid-winter he would venture out collecting Morris dances and folk or mumming plays.

At Christmas in 1913 Tiddy journeyed to the villages on the Northamptonshire-Warwickshire border near where I live today. He collected the texts from local groups of mummers performing around the villages in an attempt to collect beer money.

He returned to the area over the next few Christmases and saw the plays performed each winter up until 1915. By then it was difficult for any village to get enough men to act out the play — most fit young men had marched away to war.

Many of the plays — remembered by the mummers but rarely written down — died along with the young soldiers who had performed them back home.

In 1915 Tiddy himself joined up. He was sent to fight in northern France and was cut down, aged just 36, by a German shell on August 10 1916.

His book The Mummers’ Play, published posthumously in 1923, is still the definitive work on the subject. The book contains 33 complete plays.

The “war to end all wars” changed the English countryside and its customs forever. The maypoles came down — the war memorials with their long engraved lists of fallen heroes went up in their place.

Few mumming plays, with their simple themes of rebirth, survived. The simple pre-Christian messages of death and magical resurrection were a little too close to reality for those soldiers who did return.

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool,
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung,
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, “Now listen up, me boys!” each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmonyThe cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.

As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was “Stille Nacht,” “Tis ‘Silent Night’,” says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
“There’s someone coming towards us!” the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one lone figure coming from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
As he bravely strode unarmed into the night.

Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man’s land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ‘em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men.

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone for evermore.

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same.

Shortly after Christmas 1914 an order was issued by John French, the general in charge of the British troops on the Western Front. He had heard of the informal truce that had broken out along the front on Christmas Day and ordered that such events must never be repeated. Just under a year later, ahead of the following Christmas, soldiers were told that they would be charged with disobeying orders if there was another truce.

The Christmas truce of 1914 varied along the front. The frequently mentioned football matches may have happened in only a few places. More commonly, soldiers met in no-man’s-land, chatting, shaking hands and swapping food.

After the war, John French conveniently forgot that he had issued orders against truces. He instead spoke of the Christmas truce of 1914 as an example of soldierly chivalry. He absurdly claimed that “soldiers should have no politics” — as if sending thousands to their deaths was somehow an apolitical act.

Pro-war politicians and commentators today also tend to talk positively about the Christmas truce, as if it were an innocuous fluffy event that we can all celebrate.

William Windsor, Duke of Cambridge, is one of the judges of a children’s competition to design a Christmas truce memorial. Super-wealthy Premiership football clubs are funding events to celebrate the footballing side of the truce.

I suspect the government, the Premiership and the Windsor family would take a rather different view if British soldiers had chatted and exchanged food — and even played football — with enemy soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Falklands.

It’s much easier to celebrate a controversial event a century after it’s happened — especially if you persistently ignore the reality that it was a rebellion against war.

Of course, the left and the anti-war movement can fall for the trick of romanticising the Christmas truce just as much as the militarists.

As the anti-war historian Adam Hochschild points out, this was not a case of working-class soldiers suddenly rejecting war. Officers up to the rank of colonel participated in the truce. Most of the soldiers obediently went back to fighting the next day.

Nonetheless, the spontaneous truce must have undermined the propaganda of each side’s government, which sought to portray the soldiers on the other side as inhuman fiends.

When people meet their enemies and discover how much they have in common, they become a threat to those who want them to fight each other.

This became apparent later in the war. After the fall of the tsar, Russian soldiers engaged in truces with Germans and Austrians that lasted longer and were more explicit in their politics. Pictures survive of Russian and German soldiers literally dancing together in no-man’s-land.

The same principle holds true today. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was talking up war with Iran in 2012, a group of anti-war Israelis set up a Facebook page called Israel Loves Iran. They told the Iranians: “We love you. We will never bomb your country.” They told the Israeli government they were “not ready to die in your war.”

Iranians responded with a similar Facebook page called “Iran Loves Israel.” One of the first people to post on it told the Israeli people: “I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you.”

Thus people in “enemy” countries see that they have more in common with each other than with their own rulers.

The question we should all be asking is the question asked by Keir Hardie, the socialist and pacifist MP, when he heard about the Christmas truce a century ago.

“Why are men who can be so friendly sent out to kill each other?” he asked. “They have no quarrel … the workers of the world are not ‘enemies’ to each other, but comrades.”

There has been much criticism of Sainsbury’s this year for using the story of the truce in their Christmas advertisement. I had expected to be annoyed or angered by the advert, so was surprised when I first viewed it.

Of course, the advert exists to make sales for an unethical corporation. It also raises funds for the Royal British Legion who, while they do work to support British victims of war, continue to promote militarism and a pro-war view of history.

The advert was not made to draw attention to the futility of war. Nonetheless, this is to some extent what it does. After they have shared food and played games, the soldiers depicted in the advert return to their trenches and continue firing at each other. Some of the people who have watched the advert must be asking themselves why.

The Christmas truce of 1914 was a spontaneous event. It was not explicit disobedience, as the orders against such truces had not been issued at that point. It was, nevertheless, a rejection of the propaganda that demonised the enemy. It was not a mutiny as such, but a sort of informal rebellion, celebrating common humanity over the demands of militarism and nationalism.

No wonder the generals on both sides were worried. If they had kept on “fraternising,” these soldiers might have brought the war to an end.

So let’s ask everyone the obvious question that most of the celebrations will ignore: If it’s acceptable to play football with someone on Christmas Day, why is it OK to shoot them on Boxing Day?

A play about the ceasefire between British and German troops at Christmas in 1914 doesn’t entirely convince, says GORDON PARSONS: here.

And many millions of animals died; not one of them a volunteer. Marianne Lubrecht, exhibition organiser of the natural history museum in Maastricht, interviewed this morning on Dutch radio, estimated that ten million horses alone were killed in the war.

She told about an exhibition right now in her museum about the role of animals during the first world war. The military massively used animals. They tried to limit deaths a bit by providing some dogs (see photo at the top of this blog post) and horses with gas masks. However, that did not help much.

Other animals had not been enlisted by the military, but still played a role in the war. In and near the trenches, dead soldiers were often not buried; or, if they had been buried, incoming artillery grenades brought the dead bodies back to the surface. This attracted many rats feeding on the dead soldiers.

The Maastricht museum exhibition organiser also told about the role of wolves on the eastern front. There, wolves fed on dead soldiers, and sometimes attacked wounded soldiers. The enemy armies of the German and Russian empires decided to stop shooting at one another for one day; and to kill wolves instead. So, the Christmas truce of 2014 of Allied and German soldiers stopping to kill each other at least for Christmas was not the only ceasefire during World War I. Though the eastern front one was not because of peaceful motives, and decided by the top brass, not by the rank and file.

The exhibition attracts many visitors. Ms Lubrecht said she was trying to extend it beyond its originally planned final day of 4 January 2015; if museums from Belgium and elsewhere which had loaned items to Maastricht would agree with that.